Voting

I don't vote, and one of the big reasons is the abortion debate. Not specifically because I am pro-life or pro-choice or pro-stem-cell-smoothies or anything, but just because I think it's emblematic of how removed from reality politics is.

Personally, I think it's reasonable to say that a person over the age of 18 should be able to legally acquire a safe abortion, and that the government can reasonably restrict someone under 18 from having one. From all accounts, an abortion is a procedure that can trigger depression, hormonal swings, and other serious psychological effects. Someone who is legally an adult should be able to make those decisions, someone who is not legally an adult can reasonably be said to not have the faculties to make an informed choice.

And do you really want parents able to pressure their children into sometimes dangerous medical procedures, if those procedures are unnecessary? On the one hand, the child might not have the greatest life. On the other hand, the new mother might be pressured into an abortion to preserve the parents' social standing.

Not that this is certainly the position I think the US should take: frankly, I know very little about this issue (which, unlike most people, means that I feel uncomfortable taking a definite stance) but from what I do know, this would be a reasonable law.

Yet moderation is totally lacking from the dialogue. The only two really viable positions in the US right now are: a) Abortion is murder, God will smite you. and b) Abortion is a right granted by any precepts of a liberal society, and without access to abortion, we may as well enslave blacks. The "Partial Birth Abortion" ban is just a thinly veiled attempt to illegalize abortion. Yet that's what we get.

A group of five people just talking and trying, absent campaigns and emotional vitriol, could probably fix the country faster than the entire political system we have in place. We don't need a Secretary of Homeland Security, we need a Secretary of Common Sense. Should we torture people? SoCS says no, since torture is ineffective and will result in US troops being tortured. Should we invade Iraq? SoCS says no, since you can't create democracy overnight, but we should probably stop with all the embargos that keep bad people in power, too.

Duke Sucks

A quote from a recent article:

"There are a lot of successful people in this country who didn't go to college," Krzyzewski said. "They should be given the right to do that. We have one of the richest men in the world (Bill Gates) who didn't finish college, giving away hundreds of millions of dollars. To me, I'd rather have it the way it was (with no age limit)."

I hate to be cynical, but Duke bases their success on the strategy of finding players who are very good, but not quite first-round NBA quality talent. There have been a few Duke players who have gone high (This last draft, two went in the first round - but both have very, very little upside), but until Elton Brand, the book on Duke over the past few years was that their players were not NBA stars (Don't even bring that Grant Hill shit in here). It's a good strategy to shoot for 3- or 4- year players, since they can develop and gain chemistry. But it does mean Duke is less likely to target big-time prospects.

It's possible Coach K is more anti-age limit because he knows that other teams are more likely to gain a competitive edge if they can get the Melos of the world to come to their school for a year before the jump to the NBA, which is not a route Duke tends to take. Is my two cents.

Duke Sucks

A quote from a recent article:

"There are a lot of successful people in this country who didn't go to college," Krzyzewski said. "They should be given the right to do that. We have one of the richest men in the world (Bill Gates) who didn't finish college, giving away hundreds of millions of dollars. To me, I'd rather have it the way it was (with no age limit)."

I hate to be cynical, but Duke bases their success on the strategy of finding players who are very good, but not quite first-round NBA quality talent. There have been a few Duke players who have gone high (This last draft, two went in the first round - but both have very, very little upside), but until Elton Brand, the book on Duke over the past few years was that their players were not NBA stars (Don't even bring that Grant Hill shit in here). It's a good strategy to shoot for 3- or 4- year players, since they can develop and gain chemistry. But it does mean Duke is less likely to target big-time prospects.

It's possible Coach K is more anti-age limit because he knows that other teams are more likely to gain a competitive edge if they can get the Melos of the world to come to their school for a year before the jump to the NBA, which is not a route Duke tends to take. Is my two cents.

Rationalizing

If you're really going to be honest about it, the best course for a perfectly rational person is to assume abject paranoia as their normal mode of operation. It's suprisingly simple to avoid interpersonal harm: just don't get too attached. To anyone or anything. Insulating one's self against the storm and the fury of a cruel and hopeless world is as easy as settling back into the Soma of pop culture and self involvement. Solipsy is a powerful salve.

Yet, for all the fetishization of rationality, nobody lives this way. Even the citidels of irrationality, the churches and mosques, have started to be infected by the mindset that if it don't proceed from a set of axiomatic truths, it ain't worthwhile. Some years ago, while I was in high school, two books came out that made me want to expell the contents of my stomach (at that time, probably Wendy's): The Case for Christ, and The Case for Faith.

When the former came out, it was easy to dismiss. The entire book is out to prove that Christ existed (something I'm not sure many people, even abjectly unreligious people, would object to) and that, therefore, Christianity is a valid religion. But the latter always struck me as a little absurd. Now, for the record, I haven't read the book. I'm straightedge these days when it comes to theology, and I feel the same way about it as would a recovering alcoholic about a jar of moonshine. It's just dangerous, you know?

Yet, has our society come so far into its delusious of rationality that faith needs antecedents and arguments to be admitted into the pantheon of belief? I feel as if the safest pulpit on the planet is the one from which one is allowed to defend faith. At its most basic, the proposition rooted in faith can be more dully called an 'axiom', and there is nothing in the celestial ether of philosophy that exists without those.

And still, those articles of faith are meaningless in the context of every day life. No matter what the ethicist might say, decisions aren't made through the intertwining prose of a long-dead German. Which brings us back to the original question: Why don't people take greater pains to behave in a rational, risk-commensurate manner? The answer is faith.

Not that they have faith in a benign universe. But whenever a person makes a choice that spurs them to action, there's a dichotomy of result. The instrumental result is what so many focus on: the practical, utilitarian effects. But the more important part, and where God exists in every choice, is the expressive value. Each action is not only going to lead to some sort of gain or loss, a calculable effect, but falls into the category of who you are.

Faith exists in every person's life in the brushstrokes of how they paint their own moral portrait. The amalgamation of these choices, these expressions, combine to make a person who they are and imbue them with their own, unique identity. If I were more Augustian today, I might even call it their soul. And yet these actions, these expressions, proceed not from rationality or anything in the realm of the dialectic. They exist purely as faith: acting a certain way because you want to believe, in purely an aesthetic sense, that this is how the world ought to be.

Taking the lumps and rolling with it as life repeatedly scorns you and your beliefs, as each person you trust betrays you, you face the choice of deciding to continue having faith that people are basically good in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary, or you can live as if people are out to get you. Paranoia may be rational, but faith is beautiful, and in the end it's the only thing that really, truly matters.